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Standing between Shell and its prize was Dan Etete, whose company acquired the rights to OPL 245 for a tiny sum while he was oil minister of Nigeria. He was later convicted of money laundering in a different case. Shell and the Italian oil company ENI eventually acquired OPL 245 in 2011 - by paying $1.3bn to the Nigerian government. That's more than the entire health budget of Nigeria but it didn't get spent on public services.

The government promptly passed on more than $1bn of the money to a company called Malabu, which was controlled by Dan Etete. Emails obtained by anti-corruption charities Global Witness and Finance Uncovered, and seen by the BBC, show that Shell representatives were negotiating with Etete for a year before the deal was finalised.

Shell also had good reason to suspect that hundreds of millions would end up in the pockets of Nigerian politicians including the former President Goodluck Jonathan.In an email from July, the same Shell employee says Etete's negotiating strategy is "clearly an attempt to deliver significant revenues to GLJ [Goodluck Jonathan] as part of any transaction."

The question to Ghana, Cameroon,Chad, Sudan, Angola, Gabon is, What did you do with your natural resources and other producct to better your people before and after oil discovery and the answer is nothing - zero -nil

Corruption i is endemic in Ghana despite their showing good face and conducting good election. Corruption is a big problem in Ghana, Example is the recent world cup Tournamant in South Africa, when Ghananian Players did quite well, but as they came back to Ghana, corrupt officials in Ghananian Football Association stole the world cup players money (fees) and some of the players have not been paid in full till today, and Ghana footbal body has been suspened by the Government, and investigation is on going and FIFA has suspended Ghana from International competition for corrupt practices.

Ghana cannot compare to Nigeria in any tangible thing now or in the near future, yes they have been conducting good elections and thats its for a small poor country, and Ghanaians and their leaders should stop camparing with Nigeria what they have not been able to do with cocoa and Gold.*

Whether all this oil will benefit the average citizen depends largely on whether extraction deals are handled in an open, transparent manner. A comparison between Brazil and Nigeria is instructive. The South American country provides monthly updates on oil production on a state website. Brazil became the seventh-largest economy in the world with the help of oil output, with 2011 per capita income of $12,594, according to World Bank statistics. In Nigeria, five decades of oil output have been mired in secrecy and conflict. Although the country's oil exports are comparable to those of Brazil, its per capita income is just $1,452.

While Uganda's 2005 Access to Information Act theoretically covers documents between the government and private companies, oil contracts typically have special provisions whereby both parties must consent before information is given to a third party, according to Gilbert Sendugwa, coordinator of the Africa Freedom of Information Centre in Uganda. The secrecy clauses prevent even parliament from getting key information, according to Dickens Kamugisha, chief executive of the Africa Institute for Energy Governance, a Kampala-based think tank that advocates for transparent energy policies.

Since few Ugandan authorities comply with requests under the access law, few journalists bother to use it. Sendugwa noted that all government ministers are required to report how they implement the information act. "We decided to test the law and sent an information request to parliament in November 2010 asking for the ministers' reports on their implementation of the Access to Information Act," he said. "To this date, none have complied."

Balkanising the country into North-South entities would undermine the central government in Abuja and bolster exploitation by these corporations.

Political analyst Olufemi Ijebuode says: “The upshot of this latest massacre is to destabilize the state of Nigeria by sowing sectarian divisions among the population. The killers may have been Boko Haram operatives, but Boko Haram is a proxy organization working on behalf of foreign powers.”

Campbell reiterated the significant observation: “The Mubi atrocity will feed a popular perception that the government can no longer ensure security in large parts of the country.”

Last year I wrote a post on Tullow Oil’s secret deals in Uganda, contrasting that situation to Tullow’s much more transparent operations in Ghana. After I published that story a Tullow Oil representative contacted me and explained that Tullow’s practices were dictated by local governments. Tullow can be transparent in Ghana because the government wants to be transparent. In Uganda, the official told me, the government does not want contract information published.

While offering general endorsements of transparency, oil companies typically defer actual requests for contract and other information to governments. “I have tried to communicate with them but they instead refer me to local government officials,” said Kuich, the South Sudanese freelance journalist. Levi Obonyo, former chairman of Kenya’s independent Media Council, says bluntly that oil companies hide behind governments to avoid public scrutiny.

We shouldn’t forget that the S.E.C. adopted rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act requiring oil and gas companies to disclose payments to foreign governments (section 1504). At the time, The Wall Street Journal reported that,  “The rules for section 1504 set a $100,000 threshold, below which companies would not have to report payments. The rules do not contain exemptions for reporting “confidential or competitively sensitive information” or exemptions for instances in which reporting the payments might violate foreign laws.”

Amid severe repression, nine members of the movement, including Dr Barinem Kiobel, were arrested, charged with specious crimes, tortured and summarily hanged. Dr Kiobel’s widow Esther and 11 other plaintiffs, all either victims of torture or relatives of victims residing in the US brought a class action suit in the US District Court.

In its defence, Shell argued that “the law of nations” does not recognise corporate liability for human rights abuses and that the ATS does not apply extraterritorially. Legal observers expect a decision in the Kiobel case at any time.

In justifying its position against the extraterritorial application of US laws, Shell underscored the “adverse consequences to US trade and foreign policy of a liberal expansion of private causes of action against corporations under international law”. It also posited that the costs associated with potential liability “may lead corporations to reduce their operations in the less-developed countries from which these suits tend to arise, to the detriment of citizens of those countries who benefit from foreign investment”.

The film explores the connections between the Ghanaian company who finds the oil field, the small Texas oil company who drills, the Wall Street private equity partners who invest, and the Ghanaian government officials who manage the contracts. The glitch, depending on your seat, comes when Ghanaian leadership changes, the justice department is called in to investigate allegations of corruption on the part of the U.S. firm and credit contracts due to the financial crisis.

Boynton also looks at the psychological motivations for the individual players, all striving to be masters of the universe, or in West African parlance, "big men." Rolling Stone spoke with Boynton about her cautious optimism for Ghana, the legacy of Milton Friedman and working with Brad Pitt and Sebastian Junger.

The fundamental question in the movie is who gets what out of the deal and so then the question is whom is pitted against whom in the deal. You’ve got private capital – Wall Street – you’ve got the oil company, you’ve got governments and you’ve got the people. And those are the principal entities looking to get a piece of the pie.

In February 2011, Donziger and his clients won the judgment after an eight-year trial in Ecuador marred by Chevron’s attempts to intimidate judges, offer bribes to Ecuador's government, fabricate scientific evidence, and sabotage the proceedings by filing dozens of frivolous motions and drowning the court in paper.  See here.

Chevron's legal team at Gibson Dunn openly markets a “template” to corporate defendants like Chevron facing large liabilities for environmental and human rights abuses.  The template, which the firm calls a “rescue operation” for clients in trouble, assumes that the wholesale intimidation of lawyers will allow clients to win via subterfuge what they can’t win on the merits. The Gibson Dunn “rescue” team – led by New York attorney Randy Mastro, Ted Boutrous, Andrea Neumann, Scott Edelman, and William Thomson – has used over 60 lawyers and billed Chevron hundreds of millions of dollars.  All their hard work has brought a fair amount of disrepute to their law firm as Chevron has suffered multiple courtroom setbacks around the world, dramatically increasing its liability and creating a shareholder rebellion against CEO Watson.  See here.

The Donziger suit explains that once Chevron realized it would lose the Ecuador trial based on the scientific evidence, the company turned to Gibson Dunn to try to render the Amazonian communities defenseless.

Malabu then sued the government. After much legal wrangling, they reached a deal in 2006 that reinstated the firm as the block’s owner. This caught Shell unawares, even though it had conducted extensive due diligence and had a keen understanding of the Nigerian operating climate thanks to its long and often bumpy history in the country. It responded by launching various legal actions, including taking the government to the World Bank’s International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes.

Tom Mayne of Global Witness, an NGO, has followed the case closely; he believes things were structured this way so that Shell and ENI could obscure their deal with Malabu by inserting a layer between them. Mr Agaev, Malabu’s former fixer, lends weight to this interpretation. It was, he says, structured to be a “safe-sex transaction”, with the government acting as a “condom” between the buyers and seller.

Shell and ENI reject the suggestion that their joint purchase was a thinly disguised transaction with a dodgy brass-plate company. Shell says it made payments to the Nigerian government only and that it has acted at all times in accordance with Nigerian law. It previously said it had “not acted in any way that is outside normal global industry practice”. ENI says its payments to the government “were made in a transparent manner through an escrow arrangement with a major international bank”. That bank was JPMorgan Chase. A Lebanese bank had earlier declined to handle the payments, it emerged in court.

the Jubilee Ghana MV 21 BV – a special purpose company[5] comprised of energy corporations – is incorporated in the Netherlands, one of the world’s leading tax havens that provides specific loopholes for corporate activities. The consortium owns the Kwame Nkrumah MV 21 – the Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) facility that will be used to exploit Ghana’s offshore oil during the first phase of development. Commenting on the Jubilee Ghana special purpose vehicle (SPV), Elmer explains that the intent is manifold: Protecting secrecy and providing legal, tax and regulatory relaxation. ‘In this case,’ he says, ‘there is a strong suspicion that the SPV [will] charge certain services to the company, therefore reducing the profit and the taxable profit. Another option is that certain currency or derivative deals with the company [will be] made with the same effect that the taxable profit is reduced in Ghana.’ The use of the Netherland’s opaque legal and financial vehicles are likely to facilitate revenue leakage, diminishing Ghana’s projected oil revenue, estimated to inject US$800 million into the economy from 2011 and 2029 (beginning with US$20 per person in 2011 before increasing to US$75 per person by 2017, if revenues are directly remitted to citizens).

Ironically, though corporate mispricing accounts for 60 per cent of illicit flight from resource-rich developing nations, specifically those in oil and-mineral rich West Africa, Ghana vies to become the Netherlands of Africa. ‘Under the IFSC, Barclays Bank has been given the license to operate the first Offshore Bank in the sub region.’[10] Cumulatively, US$13 trillion in private wealth is stashed by tax evaders and avoiders in secrecy jurisdictions. If taxed at a moderate 7.5 per cent rate of return, these funds would yield US$865 billion dollars annually.

"The Ghanaian government must establish a legal framework that ensures transparent publication of oil payments received, open and competitive contract bidding and contract disclosure, and active monitoring and participation by civil society," Oxfam America urged.

Richard Hato-Kuevor, Oxfam America's Extractive Industries Advocacy Officer in Accra, says "The Ghanaian Parliament is currently debating an oil revenue bill, and important provisions - such as a prohibition against using oil revenue as collateral for loans - have already been stripped out of the bill. A Petroleum Exploration and Production Bill, which had numerous weaknesses, has been shelved. Celebrations of first oil are clouded by the fact that the government has yet to establish an independent regulator since the Jubilee discovery was announced in 2007."

Despite overwhelming public support for the provision baring oil-backed loans, Parliament last week voted to remove the bar and allow for oil-backed loans. Following on that, Ghana has signed the STX housing agreement, which many believe uses oil as collateral.